Black Women Lead the Way to Change: Four Strategies That Work

Black feminists in Chicago have been breaking ground as leaders and we can all learn from their strategies and successes. Salamishah Tillet, writing for the New York Times, reports on some of their recent accomplishments:

  • Lori Lightfoot became the first black woman mayor of Chicago in 2019.
  • In 2016, Kim Foxx, a black woman, became the city’s top prosecutor.
  • In May 2015, black feminist activists pushed Chicago to become the first city to award reparations to people who survived police torture in the 1970s and ’80s.
  • Rahm Emanuel, the previous mayor, decided not to seek a third term as mayor after black women organized a citywide campaign against him.
  • Thanks to black feminist activists, Illinois became the first state in the Midwest to approve a path to a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

Tillet highlights a four-point model for change used by the black women in Chicago that can be a guide to change for the rest of us:

  1. Blend activism and the academy—Organizers and professors at many universities in Illinois work together to ensure that community activists and young black people work together and listen to each other. Young black people who feel engaged and empowered affect change. Their engagement can make the difference in elections and policy changes.
  2. Work across generations—Older feminists encourage young activists to be at the forefront and utilize their expertise, while older feminist activists provide guidance from the sidelines.
  3. Share power—The black feminists of Chicago encourage many local leaders to emerge rather than allow a single charismatic figure like Louis Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson to set an agenda. People show up for each other’s campaigns rather than align with only one candidate. People show up for each other’s issues as well.
  4. Work on several issues at once—Collaboration that brings focus to the intersection of issues such as low wages, police violence, and the recent murders of black women and girls is a critical strategy. For example, in 2015 after Black Lives Matter of Chicago organized a rally outside of a McDonald’s to stand with food workers striking for a $15 minimum wage, they all marched to a nearby police department to demand the firing of a police officer who shot an unarmed bystander. This last strategy has always been a hallmark of black feminism—a focus on the intersection of sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of oppression.

Potential presidential candidates have a lot of good reasons to court the support and votes of black feminist activists, whose proven track record of successfully organizing for change is formidable.

 

Photo courtesy of Johnny Silvercloud (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Costs of Racism for Black Women: The Concept of Weathering

I often wonder why so many of my black women friends have died so early. Specifically, I have had the joy of being a member of a black and white women’s support group for more than twenty-five years. During these years in our group of seven to nine members, all of the original white members remained healthy and three of the black members passed away. As a white woman, I not only miss my friends, but I have been bewildered by these differences in our mortality. Let me be clear—our members have very few differences in our backgrounds and life experiences other than race. We are all middle-class professional women raised in middle-class professional two-parent households. We are all college educated and about the same age. Race is what differentiates us. Recent studies on infant and maternal mortality in the United States reported in the New York Times Magazine by Linda Villarosa opened my eyes and gave me some language to explain what may have caused the early deaths of my black women friends. While none of the three women in our group died from causes related to maternity or childbirth, the findings in these studies seem to explain a lot more about health disparities between African American and white women than just higher rates of infant and maternal mortality. Infant and maternal mortality rates are, however, both shocking and what led researchers to their broader conclusions about the impact of race on health. Villarosa reports on several examples from recent studies:

  • Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants—a racial disparity that is actually wider now than it was in 1850, fifteen years before the end of slavery.
  • Education and income offer little protection. A black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.
Villarosa cites seminal research by Dr. Arline Geronimus, published in 1992, that first linked stress and black infant mortality in her theory of weathering. Villarosa explains that Dr. Geronimus “believed that a kind of toxic stress triggered the premature deterioration of the bodies of African-American women as a consequence of repeated exposure to a climate of discrimination and insults”—in other words, the lived experience of race in this country. In 1997 a team of female researchers from Boston and Howard Universities expanded on earlier studies showing the health effects of racism. Villarosa reports that their research concluded that “the bone-deep accumulation of traumatizing life experiences and persistent insults” results in the sustained, long term release of stress hormones, which can lead to wear and tear on the cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune systems, making the body vulnerable to illness and even early death. This wear and tear is the process mentioned previously called weathering by Dr. Geronimus. In 2006, Dr. Geronimus and her colleagues found that, even when controlling for income and education, African American women had the highest levels of stress-associated body chemicals—higher than both white women and black men. The researchers concluded that “persistent racial differences in health may be influenced by the stress of living in a race-conscious society. These effects may be felt particularly by black women because of [the] double jeopardy of gender and racial discrimination.” Deeply ingrained stereotypes about women and people of color are literally killing black women. I recently saw a sign that said “White Silence Is Violence.” As a white woman, I urge other whites to take action:
  • Become aware of the deeply ingrained stereotypes in our society about people of color.
  • Become aware of our own unconscious bias and white privilege and talk with other white people about what you are learning.
  • Watch for and speak out when you see discrimination or unfair treatment of a person in any minority group.
Change starts with each of us, and our society will change when we change.   Photo courtesy of James Palinsad (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>

Dems Rely on Black Women Voters: But Why Can’t Black Women Get Elected?

Governor Votes Early Donna Brazile writes in Ms. magazine that in the elections of 2008 and 2012, the group that turned out to vote in the highest numbers was black women. In 2012, 60 percent of 18- to 29-year-old-black women voted, and 76 percent of all black women were registered to vote. A recent Pew study found that in 2012, the voter turnout in the United States was low—53.6 percent of the estimated voting-age population. Only 65 percent of the US voting-age population even bothered to register to vote. Brazile cites “The Power of the Sister Vote” poll from Essence magazine, which indicates that the turnout will again be strong for black women in 2016, “driven by a hunger to institutionalize their gains” in:

  • Increased affordable health-care access
  • Quality education reform and access to low-cost college education
  • Living-wage reforms
  • Criminal justice reforms
But the frustration levels are high for political candidates like Donna Edwards, an African American woman who just lost the Democratic primary race for a Senate seat in Maryland. Jill Filipovic writes in the New York Times that while the Democrats rely on black female voters, only one black woman has ever been elected to the Senate. In addition, while Trump accuses Clinton of playing the “woman card,” Edwards, during her primary race, was accused of playing both the “woman card” and the “race card.” The implication is that these “cards” somehow confer unearned advantages to the women holding them. Yet research shows that for black women, combined stereotypes about both race and gender create double challenges for them to be perceived as competent leaders and elected, or hired, to leadership positions. Filipovic suggests that the problem, in general, is that authority, competence, and power are perceived to be male qualities. Several recent studies show that when the same résumés are shown to both male and female evaluators, the documents are rated more highly when they have a man’s name, John, on the top than when the same documents have a woman’s name, Jennifer, at the top. Filipovic proposes that to fight pervasive prejudices, we need to change our images of competence and power by putting more women, especially more women of color, into positions of authority and leadership so that women in authority becomes normal rather than unusual. Specifically, she says, “we can’t change longstanding assumptions about what a leader looks like unless we change what leaders look like. . . . Democrats should make [the ‘woman card’ and the ‘race card’] central components of a winning hand.” She also suggests that when there are equally qualified men and women competing for positions, Democrats should champion politicians who are not white men. It’s the only way that, in the long run, we are all going to win.   Photo credit: Governor Votes Early. by Jay Baker at Baltimore, MD. via Maryland GovPics on Flickr]]>